~ Chapter Nine ~
A
Curriculum for Christlikeness
Obedience and
Abundance
“Certainly life on ‘the rock’ must be a good way to
live. Wouldn’t you like to be one of those intelligent people who know how to
live a rich and unshakable life? One free from loneliness, fear, and anxiety
and filled with constant peace and joy? Would you like to love your neighbors
as you do yourself and be free of anger, envy, lust, and covetousness? Would
you like to have no need for others to praise you, and would you like to not be
paralyzed and humiliated by their dislike and condemnation? Would you like to
have the inspiration and strength to lead a constant life of creative goodness?
It sounds pretty good thus far, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you also like to have a
strength and understanding that enables you to bless those who are cursing
you—or cheating you, or beat you out on the job, spitting on you in a
confrontation, laughing at your religion or culture, even killing you? Or the strength and understanding merely to give
further needed assistance to someone who has forced you to drop what you are
doing and help out? To offer the other cheek to someone who has slapped you?
Clearly, our entire inner reality of thought and feeling would have to be
transformed to bring us to such a place.” [342]
“[A] part of this sounds very like abundance of life: a very desirable
condition to be in that immediately recommends itself to everyone. But other
parts seem like obedience: something
that well might spoil our plans or ruin our life… But the truth about obedience
in the kingdom of Jesus [is] that it really is
abundance. They are not two separate things. The inner condition of the soul
from which strength and love and peace flow is the very same condition that
generously blesses the oppressor and lovingly offers the other cheek. These
Christlike behaviors are expressions of a pervasive personal strength and its
joy, not of weakness, morbidity, sorrow—or raw exertion of will—as is so often
assumed. And all those old ‘options’ that we might think should be kept in
reserve, just in case they turn out to be ‘necessary,’ will not even be
missed.” [342-343]
“[The] correlation between faith in Christ and the obedience/abundance of life in Christ has now become, apparently, something of a mystery.
Yes, it is a relationship that has functioned well in many periods of Christian
history. The cultural and literary record is there for all to see. And there
still are those today for whom faith in Christ progressively modulates into
both obedience and abundance. I meet such people. But, not many. The usual
Christian experience does not progress in that way. And it is mainly because
individuals are rarely offered any effective guidance into the inner substance
of the path laid down by Jesus in his teachings and example.” [343]
Training in
Christlikeness: The Necessity of Belief
“Training in Christlikeness is a responsibility
[Jesus’ people] have for those who enter their number. But at the present time
intentional, effective training in Christlikeness—within the framework of a
clear-eyed apprenticeship commitment and a spiritual ‘engulfment’ in the
Trinitarian reality—is just not there for
us.” [343] “[A] great deal of what goes into ‘training them [us] to do
everything I said’ consists simply in bringing
people to believe with their whole being the information they already have
as a result of their initial confidence in Jesus—even if that initial
confidence was only the confidence of desperation.” [437]
“[As] Jesus’ current assistants in his ongoing
program, one important way of characterizing our work of ‘training disciples to
do everything I told you’ is ‘bringing them to actually believe all the things
they have already heard.’… The ordinary members of a church have an immense
amount of information about God, Jesus, what they ought to do, and their own
destiny. It has come to them through the Christian tradition. Some parts of it
are false or misguided, to be sure. No one completely avoids that—even me. But generally we have the ‘right
answers,’ and those answers are very precious indeed. But as things stand we
are, by and large, unable to believe them in the way we genuinely do believe
multitudes of things in our ‘real’ life… [A] great deal of what goes into
‘training them [us] to do everything I said’ consists simply in bringing people to believe with their whole
being the information they already have as a result of their initial
confidence in Jesus—even if that initial confidence was only the confidence of
desperation.” [347-348]
The Disciple Is
Not Perfect – Yet
“[There is] a common misconception that those who are
studying with Jesus have already realized in themselves the vision and practice
of the kingdom. You often hear being a disciple spoken of as if it were an
advanced spiritual condition. Not necessarily. The disciple has made a major
step forward, to be sure, but may in fact still have a solid hold on very
little of kingdom reality. Jesus’ disciples are those who have chosen to be
with him to learn to be like him. All they have necessarily realized at the outset
of their apprenticeship to him is, Jesus
is right. That initial faith is God’s gift of grace to them. So they have
him. They do not yet have it. Living as his apprentices, they are increasingly
getting ‘it.’ And as they move along they do indeed attain, by increasing
grace, to an ‘advanced spiritual condition.’ They increase in the amount and
quality of grace (interaction with God) they have in their real life. That is
the same as increasing in their experiential knowledge of the real person,
Jesus Christ, which in our current condition just is the eternal kind of life
(2 Pet. 3:18; compare John 17:3). Toward the beginning of their course they do
not, for example, really believe that the meek and persecuted are blessed, and
certainly not the poor. That is, they do not automatically act as if it were
so. But they know that Jesus does believe this, and they believe that he is
right about what they themselves do not yet, really, believe. Further, they
want to believe it because, seeing his strength and beauty, they admire him so
much and have such confidence in him. That is why they have become his students
and have trusted him—or intend to
trust him—for everything.” [349]
“We are captivated by Jesus and trust ourselves to him
as his apprentices. He then leads us to genuine understanding and reliance upon
God in every aspect of our life. But that progression takes some time, and it
is supposed to come in part through the efforts of others among his people, who
are prepared to train us so that we are able to do, and routinely do, all of
the things he said we should. In order to become a disciple of Jesus, then, one
must believe in him. In order to develop as his disciple one must progressively
come to believe what he knew to be so. To be at home in his kingdom, learning
to reign with him there, we must share his beliefs. As his apprentices, we pass
through a course of training, from having faith in Christ to having the faith
of Christ (Gal. 2:16-20). As a proclaimer and teacher of the gospel of his
kingdom, I do not cease to announce a gospel about Jesus. That remains forever foundational. But I also
recognize the need and opportunity to announce the gospel of Jesus (Mark 1:1)—the gospel of the present availability to every
human being of a life in The Kingdom Among Us. Without that, the gospel about
Jesus remains destructively incomplete.” [349-350]
Objectives in a
Curriculum for Christ-Likeness
“Two objectives in particular [in a curriculum of
Christ-likeness] that are often taken as primary
goals must not be left in that position. They can be introduced later in proper
subordination to the true ones. These are external
conformity to the wording of Jesus’ teachings about actions in specific
contexts and profession of perfectly
correct doctrine. Historically these are the very things that have obsessed
the church visible—currently, the latter far more than the former. We need wait
no longer. The results are in. They do not provide a course of personal growth
and development that routinely produces people who ‘hear and do.’ They either
crush the human mind and soul and separate people from Jesus, or they produce
hide-bound legalists and theological experts with ‘lips close to God and hearts
far away from him’ (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.”
[350-351]
“Special experiences, faithfulness to the church,
correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come
along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is
transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation. The human heart
must be plowed more deeply. Thus these four emphases are good in their place,
and even necessary when rightly understood. But when taken as primary objectives, they only burden
souls and make significant Christlikeness extremely difficult, if not
impossible.” [351]
“The first [primary]
objective is to bring apprentices to the point where they dearly love and
constantly delight in that ‘heavenly Father’ made real to earth in Jesus and
are quite certain that there is no ‘catch,’ no limit, to the goodness of his
intentions or to his power to carry them out… When the mind is filled with
[our] great and beautiful God, the ‘natural’ response, once all ‘inward’
hindrances are removed, will be to do ‘everything that I have told you to do.’
The second objective [is] to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom
of God, to free the apprentices of domination, or ‘enslavement’ (John 8:34;
Rom. 6:6), to their old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action. These
are the ‘automatic’ patterns of response that were ground into the embodied
social self during its long life outside The Kingdom Among Us. They make up
‘the sin that is in my members’ which, as Paul so brilliantly understood,
brings it about that ‘wishing to do the good is mine, but the doing of it is
not’ (Rom. 7:18).” [352]
“The training that leads to doing what we hear from Jesus [must] involve, first, the purposeful
disruption of our ‘automatic’ thoughts, feelings, and actions by doing
different things with our body. And then, through various intentional
practices, we place the body before God and his instrumentalities in such a way
that our whole self is restrained away from the old kingdoms around and within
us and into ‘the kingdom of the Son of His love’ (Col. 1:13). This part of the
curriculum for Christlikeness consists of ‘disciplines for the spiritual
life.’” [353]
Turning The
Mind Toward God
“With regard to our first primary objective [of coming
to love God], the most important question we face is, How do we help people
love what is lovely? Very simply, we cause them, ask them, help them to place their minds on the lovely thing
concerned. We assist them to do this in every way possible. Saint Thomas
Aquinas remarks that ‘love is born of an earnest consideration of the object
loved.’ And: ‘Love follows knowledge.’ Love is an emotional response aroused in
the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never
blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of
the beloved. As teachers we therefore bring the lovely thing—in this case,
God—before the disciple as fully and forcibly as possible, putting our best
efforts into it. But we never forget that in the last analysis, as we have
already learned from Emily Dickinson, ‘the soul selects her own society, then
shuts the door.’ Though we act, and as intelligently and responsibly as
possible, we are always in the position of asking:
asking them, asking God, and responding to their responses.” [354]
“A popular saying is ‘Take time to smell the roses.’
What does this mean? To enjoy the rose it is necessary to focus on it and bring
the rose as fully before our senses and mind as possible. To smell a rose you
must get close, and you must linger. When we do so, we delight in it. We love
it. Taking time to smell the roses leaves enduring impressions of a dear glory
that, if sufficiently reengaged, can change the quality of our entire life. The
rose in a very special way—and more generally the flower, even in its most
humble forms—is a fragile but irrepressible witness on earth to a ‘larger’
world where good is somehow safe.” [354-355]
“This [illustration of the rose] contains profound
truths. If anyone is to love God and have his or her life filled with that
love, God in his glorious reality must be brought before the mind and kept
there in such a way that the mind takes root and stays fixed there. Of course
the individual must be willing for this to happen, but any genuine apprentice
to Jesus will be willing. This is the very lesson apprentices have enrolled in
his school to learn. So the question for the first part of our curriculum is
simply how to bring God adequately
before the mind and spirit of the disciple. This is to be done in such a way
that love for and delight in God will be elicited and established as the
pervasive orientation of the whole self. It will fill the mind of the willing
soul and progress toward an easy and delightful governance of the entire
personality. Our first primary objective will then have been achieved.” [355]
Our Mind and Our
Choices. “[What] simply occupies
our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of
which our actions flow, and it projects the possible courses of action
available to us. Also the mind, though of little power on its own, is the place
of our widest and most basic freedom. This is true in both a direct and an
indirect sense. Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with respect to what we will think of, where we will
place our mind, than anything else. And the freedom of thinking is a direct
freedom wherever it is present. We need not do something else in order to
exercise it. We simply turn our mind to whatever it is we choose to think of.
The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in
thought, what constantly occupies our mind—as well as what we can or cannot
even think of.” [355]
“As the line from A.E. Houseman says, ‘We think by
fits and starts.’ Thus a part of the call of God to us has always been to think. Indeed the call of Jesus to
‘repent’ is nothing but a call to think about how we have been thinking. And
when we come to the task of developing disciples into the fullness of Christ,
we must be very clear that one main point, and by far the most fundamental, is to form the insights and habits of the
student’s mind so that it stays directed toward God. When this is
adequately done, a full heart of love will go out toward God, and joy and
obedience will flood the life.” [355-356]
“The distortion, or ‘wrungness,’ of the
will—theologians of another day called it ‘corruption’—is primarily a matter of
our refusal to dwell in our minds on
right things in the right way. We ‘refuse to retain God in our knowledge,’ as
Paul says (Rom. 1:28).” [356]
“[Modern] attempts to think about God independently of
historical revelation have been thoroughly victimized by currents of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy that simply make knowledge of God—and
maybe everything else—an impossibility. Indeed, something laughable. This
forces one to handle the texts and traditions of Jesus in such a way that he
can never bring us to a personal God whom we can love with all our being. But
things often turn out little better for theology on the right. It tends to be
satisfied with having the right doctrines or traditions and to stop there
without ever moving on to consuming admiration of, delight in, and devotion to
the God of the universe. On the one hand, these are treated as not necessary, because
we have the right answers; and on the other hand, we are given little, if any,
example and teaching concerning how to move on to honest and full-hearted love
of God.” [360]
“The acid test for any
theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul,
mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is ‘Not really,’ then we
need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated
intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God – a radiant, happy,
friendly, accessible, and totally competent being – before ordinary people, we
have gone wrong.” [360]
A Harmful Myth. “One
[harmful myth] is the idea that questions about God as creator have recently
been conclusively settled in the negative by the progress of ‘scientific
knowledge,’ and that nothing of significance can be known of God from examining
the order of nature—or anything else there may be. One hundred years ago, by
contrast, the general assumption was that those questions had been settled in
the positive: God was regarded as manifestly present in nature. These positive
answers were routinely taught as
knowledge in schools at all levels, and the few dissenters were heard. No
doubt the dissenters often were not treated with dignity. Now the pattern is
almost exactly reversed. But just as the positive answers in earlier times were
sometimes based more on readiness to believe than on accurate thinking—though there
was really no need for that—so the negative ‘answers’ that now dominate our
culture are mainly based on a socially enforced readiness to disbelieve. And those negative answers, which find no
God in nature, really do need help from social conditioning… To understand why
the negative prejudice is so strong now, just reflect on how the entire system
of human expertise, as represented by our many-tiered structure of
certification and accreditation, has a tremendous vested interest in ruling God
out of consideration. For, if it
cannot do that, it is simply wrong about what it presents as knowledge and
reality—of which God is no part... God currently forms no part of recognized
human competence in any field of knowledge or practice. But if this actually is
God’s universe, the current lords of knowledge have made what is surely the
greatest mistake in human history. Believing the world is flat or the moon is
cheese would be nothing in comparison to their mistake. To believe that the
current lords of ‘knowledge’ are right, on the other hand, is to omit the
spiritual God and the spiritual life from the literally real. It is to take
them to be illusions; and two or more centuries of ‘advanced thinking’ have now
been devoted to showing that they are
illusions. So the battle to identify our universe as God’s and our existence as
part of his creation simply has to go on. We cannot stand aside. And in
training people to ‘hear and do,’ we must take an open, loving, and intelligent
stand on these fundamental matters.” [361-362]
Loving God in
the Midst of Life
“It is noteworthy that when Job finally stood before
God he was completely satisfied and at rest, though not a single one of his
questions about his sufferings had been answered. His questions were good
questions. He did not sin in asking them. But in the light of God himself they
were simply pointless. They just drop away and lose their interest. Let us now
be perfectly clear. Your life is not something from you can stand aside and
consider what it would have been like had you
had a different one. There is no ‘you’ apart from your actual life. You are not
separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God.
Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you, and you will not truly
be at peace with him. You must find the goodness of God and the fellowship of
Jesus in who you are, or your love for the Father and his unique Son cannot
become the foundation for a life of abundance/obedience. They desire to dwell
with you in your life and make glorious every aspect of it in the light of the
whole that God has planned (John 14). Today many will say that this simply does
not do justice to the bitter facts of life. What of victims of sexual abuse or
of dreadful diseases, birth defects, war, and other terrible things? But if we
have suffered terribly, we must choose not to let that be our life focus. We
must, if we can, focus on God, God’s world, and ourselves as included in it
with a glorious destiny of our own. And when we cannot, we should seek out
those who bring or can help us find the power of the kingdom to do so.
Gratitude then focuses forward on redemption, and on the future that is given
to us in God’s future, come what may. In the light of that, we return to
receive, to even welcome, our life as it actually has been and is.” [373]
On Conformity
to Christ
“[The] second
main objective in a curriculum for Christlikeness [is] the breaking of the
power of patterns of wrongdoing and evil that govern our lives because of our
long habituation to a world alienated from God. We must learn to recognize
these habitual patterns for what they are and escape from their grasp.” [374]
“It is assumed by Paul that ‘sin will not govern in
our physical bodies to make us do what it wants, and that we will not go on giving
our bodily parts to sin as tools of unrighteousness, but give ourselves to God
as those whose physical bodies have already died, and our bodily parts to God
as tools of righteousness’ (Rom. 6:12-13). The problem currently is that we
have little idea—and less still of contemporary models—of what this looks like.
Consumer Christianity is now normative. The consumer Christian is one who
utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for
special occasions, but does not give his or her life and innermost thoughts,
feelings, and intentions over to the kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians
are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it. Because this is so, they
remain not just ‘imperfect,’ for all of us remain imperfect, but routinely and
seriously unable and unwilling to do the good they know to do… They remain governed by, or ‘slaves’ of, sin. For
example, their lives are dominated by fear, greed, impatience, egotism, bodily
desires, and the like, and they continue to make provision for them. It is this
condition that the curriculum for Christlikeness must abolish.” [374-375]
On Bad Habits. “Our
training and experience must bring us to peace with the fact that if we do not
follow our habitual desires, do not do what ‘normal’ people would do, it is no
major thing. We won’t die, even though at the beginning our outraged habits
will ‘tell’ us we are sure to. The sun will come up and life will go on: better
than we ever dreamed. Rightly understood, the ‘death to self’ of which
scripture and tradition speak is simply the acceptance of this fact. It is the ‘cross’
applied to daily existence. And it is a major part of what disciples must learn
in order to break the grip of the ‘motions of sin in their members’ that drive
them. Patterns of anger, scorn, and ‘looking to lust’ vividly illustrate the
basic triviality of the drive to wrongdoing. ‘The look’ is only a habit. There
is nothing deep or vital about it. One looks to lust or to covet upon certain
cues. Anyone who bothers to reflect on his or her experience will be able to
identify what those cues are. This is also true of anger, scorn, and—you name
it. It’s not like the law of gravity. Falling when you step off a platform is
not a habit. Cultivated lusting, anger, and so on are. And, generally speaking,
those who say they ‘cannot help it’ are either not well informed about life or have
not decided to do without ‘it.’ Most likely the latter. But the really good
news here is that the power of habit can be broken. Habits can be changed. And
God will help us to change them—though he will not do it for us—because he has
a vital interest in who we become. If, for example, you have decided not to let
anger or lusting govern you, you can train yourself [to] use the very ‘cues’
that until now have served to activate habits of anger and lusting to activate
thoughts, feelings, and actions that will rule them out. Multitudes have found
this to be so.” [377-378]
“The training required to transform our most basic
habits of thought, feeling, and action will not be done for us. And yet it is
something that we cannot do by ourselves. Life in all its forms must reach out
to what is beyond it to achieve fulfillment, and so also the spiritual life.
The familiar words of Jesus are ‘Without me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5).
But these must be balanced by the insight that, in general, if we do nothing it
will certainly be without him.” [378]
“[We] have received the life of the kingdom through
the word of the gospel and the person of Jesus. That life we have as a gift.
But once we have it, there is something for us to do, for, as noted earlier,
the person we become cannot be the effect of what someone else does. Therefore
we are to ‘work out’ the salvation we have (Phil. 2:12). The word here, katergazesthe, has the sense of
developing or alaborating something, bringing it to the fullness of what in its
nature it is meant to be. But we do not do this as if the new life were simply our project. It isn’t. God also is at
work in us, ‘choosing and acting on behalf of his intentions’ (v. 13). Hence we
do what we do—and what will not be done for
us—with ‘fear and trembling’ because we know who else is involved.” [379]
“[We] must accept the circumstances we constantly find
ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless
anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation
after situation, moment after moment, as not being ‘right,’ we will simply have
no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments
are our life. Our life presents
itself to us as a series of tasks. Our more serious challenges are trials, even tribulations. In biblical language they are all ‘temptations.’ Just
listen to how people carry on! For some of us the first tribulation of the day
is just getting up. And then there is caring for ourselves. Then the commute.
Then work and other people. But knowledge of the kingdom puts us in position to
welcome all of these, because [we] are in a position to thrive on everything
life can throw at us—including getting up of a morning! Whatever comes will
only confirm the goodness and greatness of the God who has welcomed us into his
world.” [381-382]
Five Dimensions
of Life in the Kingdom of God [402-403]
1. Confidence in
and reliance upon Jesus as ‘the Son of man,’ the one appointed to save us.
Relevant scriptural passages here are John 3:15; Rom. 10:9-10; and 1 Cor. 13:3.
This confidence is a reality, and it is itself a true manifestation of the ‘life
from above,’ not of normal human capacities. It is, as Heb. 11:1 says, ‘the
proof of things not seen.’ Anyone who truly has this confidence can be completely
assured that they are ‘included.’
2. But this confidence in the person of Jesus
naturally leads to a desire to be his
apprentice in living in and from the kingdom of God… Our apprenticeship to
him means that we live within his word, that is, put his teachings into
practice (John 8:31). And this progressively integrates our entire existence
into the glorious world of eternal living. We become ‘free indeed’ (John 8:36).
3. The abundance of life realized through
apprenticeship to Jesus, ‘continuing in his word,’ naturally leads to obedience. The teaching we have received
and our experience of living with it brings us to love Jesus and the Father
with our whole being: heart, soul, mind, and (bodily) strength. And so we love
to obey him, even where we do not yet understand or, really, ‘like’ what that
requires. (John 14:15, 21) Love of Jesus sustains us through the course of
discipline and training that makes obedience possible. Without that love, we
will not stay to learn.
4. Obedience, with the life of discipline it requires,
both leads to and, then, issues from the pervasive
inner transformation of the heart and soul. The abiding condition of the
disciple becomes one of ‘love, joy, peace, long-suffering [patience], kindness,
goodness, faith to the brim, meekness and self-control’ (Gal. 5:22; compare 2
Pet. 1:2-11). And the love is genuine to our deepest core. These are called the
‘fruit of the spirit’ because they are not direct effects of our efforts but
are brought about in us as we admire and emulate Jesus and do whatever is
necessary to learn how to obey him.
5. Finally, there is power to work the works of the kingdom. One of the most shocking
statements Jesus ever made [was] that ‘those who rely on me shall do the works
I do, and even greater ones’ (John 14:12). Perhaps we feel baffled and
incompetent before this statement. But let us keep in mind that the world we
live in desperately needs such works to be done. They would not be just for
show or to impress ourselves or others. But, frankly, even a moderate-sized ‘work’
is more than most people’s life could sustain. One good public answer to our
prayer might be enough to lock some of us into weeks of spiritual superiority.
Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse,
and that character is something we only grow toward. Yet it is God’s intent
that in his kingdom we should have as much power as we can bear for good.
Indeed, his ultimate objective in the development of human character is to
empower us to do what we want. And when we are fully developed in the likeness
of Jesus, fully have ‘the mind of Christ,’ that is what will happen—to his
great joy and relief, no doubt.
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